Its been nearly a month since my last post, and not without reason. Nearly all of my time has gone into two semester-long projects, a 16mm documentary film on the Salvation Army in Central Square and a hand-drawn cell animation, both of which will be screened Friday.

Friday 11:30am-3pm
Animation Party and Screening (bring friends for food + animation)
11:30am-1pm – Thai food on the first floor of the Carpenter Center
1pm-3pm – all animation from the spring semester classes will be screened

Friday 7pm-10:30pm
Screening of intermediate and thesis film, video, animation projects in the large theater in the basement of the Carpenter Center

Only my animation will be screened in the afternoon screening, while both of my projects will be shown in the first half of the evening program. The evening program is supposedly ticketed, but if you arrive on time you will probably get a seat even without one. Or let me know and I can try to get you a ticket.

Brief documentary by Mika about the problems with DRM and iPods, and how to “liberate” your iPod with Rockbox. Much of the footage is from Freeculture‘s iPod Liberation Party back in the fall, some of which I may have shot. Also, you can see me for a couple seconds towards the middle of the film. Check it out, and then consider freeing your own ipod.

Governments worldwide invest billions of dollars in research every year. Yet the results of this researchâ€” a treasury of medical knowledgeâ€” are mostly privately owned and sold only to those who can afford the costly article fees or journal subscriptions. While there have been several movements in the scientific community to fix this problem, solutions for the social sciences and humanities have not been explored in depth.

Opening Up to Open Access
A Discussion with Gavin Yamey, Public Library of Science

Do you see what is going on here? The IMF’s bailout is not marked for Ukrainian social services or any other benefit to the citizenry. All that is about to be taken away, in the neoliberal style. The bailout money goes to Kiev and back out again to the Western financial institutions holding Ukrainian debt. In effect, debt held by private-sector creditors is transferred to the IMF, which uses it to leverage Ukraine into a free-market model via its standard conditionality: No austerity, no dough.

Must read piece by Mychal Denzel Smith and Jesse Myerson in The Nation, featuring both sober historical analysis and concrete proposals to organize around (Job & Income Guarantee, Land Value Tax, and Baby Bonds):

Before laying out our proposals, we should clarify why, historically, eliminating racism requires an economic program. America’s story is one of economic exploitation driving the creation and maintenance of racism over time. The inception of our country’s economic system condemned black people to an underclass for a practical rather than bigoted reason: the exploitation of African labor. Imported Africans were prevented by customs and language barriers from entering into contracts, and unlike the indigenous population, their lack of familiarity with the terrain prevented them from running away from their slavers. To morally justify an economy dependent on oppression, in a nation newly founded on the rights of men to freedom, it was necessary to socially construct a biological fiction called race, one that deemed some people subhuman, mere property.